CIA tapes flap points to interrogation flaws

Wednesday

Dec 26, 2007 at 12:01 AM

WASHINGTON — The controversy over destroyed CIA videotapes has highlighted weaknesses in U.S. intelligence agencies' methods of interrogation of al-Qaida suspects, according to current and former officials and experts, who say those methods are compromising the ability to extract vital information about the threat from Islamic extremism.

JOSH MEYER

WASHINGTON — The controversy over destroyed CIA videotapes has highlighted weaknesses in U.S. intelligence agencies' methods of interrogation of al-Qaida suspects, according to current and former officials and experts, who say those methods are compromising the ability to extract vital information about the threat from Islamic extremism.

Congress, the Justice Department and the CIA inspector general are investigating why the CIA in 2005 destroyed the tapes of its interrogations of two alleged senior al-Qaida leaders, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, three years after they were made. Investigators believe that the videotapes captured Zubaydah being waterboarded — a controversial tactic that mimics the experience of drowning.

But the fact that the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies say they have not videotaped the interrogations of potentially hundreds of other suspected terrorists indicates an outmoded level of secrecy and unprofessionalism, the current and former interrogation experts contend.

They say that the U.S. is behind the curve of current best practices, and that videotaping is an essential tool in improving the methods — and results — of questioning terrorism suspects. And the accountability it provides is needed to address international concerns about the United States' use of coercive and potentially illegal techniques in interrogations, these experts add.

"We are operating in a vacuum, said Col. Steven M. Kleinman, a reserve senior intelligence officer for the Air Force's Special Operations Command. He was a military interrogator in Panama and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

"We are not giving our interrogators the skill set or the tool chest to get the information that we need."

Kleinman is one of several government experts participating in a continuing study of interrogation for the Intelligence Science Board, an advisory body of the Directorate of National Intelligence and U.S. intelligence agencies.

Last year the advisory group issued its first report, a politely worded but critical document titled "Educing Information-Interrogation: Science and Art." It concluded that the U.S. government has not in any scientific manner studied the effectiveness of its methods of interrogation since the end of World War II, and that it is still using the same unproven techniques

Kleinman and other study participants said that the CIA's failure to videotape its interrogation of as many as 100 "high-value" terrorism suspects has prevented its capturing the details of those interrogations in a way that they can be archived, compared and analyzed in-depth by a range of government experts.

The Intelligence Science Board's report concluded that the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies had done so little questioning of hostile subjects since the 1950s that individual interrogators were forced to "make it up" on the fly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and its authors say that little has changed since then.

"This shortfall in advanced, research-based interrogation methods ... may have contributed significantly to the unfortunate cases of abuse that have recently come to light," such as Abu Ghraib and the controversy over the interrogation of suspects, the report said.

The advisory group issued recommendations earlier this year about how the U.S. government should improve its interrogation efforts, including identifying better ways of building a well-trained cadre of professionals who can use non-coercive techniques that are not at odds with international norms.

So far, however, those recommendations have gone largely unheeded, several study participants said.

"There doesn't seem to be a core agency in the U.S. government that has this on its radar screen," said study participant Randy Borum, a forensic psychologist who recently served as the principal investigator on a "Psychology of Terrorism" initiative for U.S. intelligence agencies.

The report said the government needs to do more research to determine whether coercive methods ever work. One U.S. counterterrorism official said they are sometimes necessary.

"If someone is implying that professional interrogation always has to involve rapport-building and stroking, I wouldn't want to defend that position were the country facing an imminent terrorist attack," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the U.S. interrogation program is classified. "Some people think that Perry Mason-style questioning works against hardened terrorists. That's sometimes not the case."

The U.S. investigations in coming months aim to determine why the CIA destroyed the tapes in November 2002 and stopped making new ones.

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has said that the agency did so largely to protect the identities of the interrogators. Hayden also has said that the tapes were destroyed only after it was determined that they were no longer of intelligence value, and that detailed summaries of the interrogations of Zubaydah and al-Nashiri were cabled back to headquarters, where they became "the products that our analysts use to create the actionable intelligence that we move on."

But much of the value of an interrogation cannot be captured in a summary of it, or even a transcript or audiotape, according to retired CIA case officer Robert Baer. He said that when he was overseeing terrorism investigations in the 1980s and 1990s, he videotaped as many interrogations as possible because it would often take years for a single utterance, bit of body language or other visual clue to become relevant.

"So when Hayden says there is no intelligence value there, he is patently wrong," said Baer. "The largest criminal case in American history, and we don't keep the evidence? Come on."

Such interrogations are often marathons that occur over a period of days, weeks and months, and visual cues known as psychometrics are invaluable in helping detect whether someone is lying, and in yielding a host of other important clues, said Magnus Ranstorp, a veteran counterterrorism expert with the Swedish Defence College.

He said that some foreign intelligence agencies videotape their interrogations and others don't, but all of them should. "You have a unique moment when you engage the adversary. The way we communicate, the way we react and conceal, can be more revealing than what we say ... and none of that shows up on a transcript."

"It's interrogation 101," Ranstorp said. If they don't save and analyze tape, "they have been derelict in their duty."

Kleinman, an interrogation instructor for the Pentagon and some foreign governments, said such videotapes are an invaluable research and teaching tool in determining which techniques work. He also said that tapes allow supervisors to vet the intelligence gained and determine if interrogators failed to ask important questions, asked leading questions or used inappropriate or possibly illegal tactics.

Many interrogation experts, including some involved in the Science Board study, say they have urged U.S. intelligence officials to look to Israel, Britain and other countries with decades of experience in dealing with the terrorist threat to learn from their successes — and their mistakes.

Israel and Britain both adopted a scientific approach to interrogations long ago, using videotape and other documentary evidence to help determine which techniques work and which don't in getting violent extremists to open up and discuss operational details of their networks and more strategic subjects such as what motivated them in the first place.

After dropping the coercive methods it had used on Irish Republican Army members, Britain developed noncoercive techniques that have served it well in dealing with Islamic extremists since Sept. 11, according to Louise Richardson of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, who has studied Britain's interrogations of IRA militants for several decades.

Israel also dropped its coercive techniques, and now spends many months interviewing alleged and convicted terrorists by first establishing a rapport with them and then getting them to open up, said Amos N. Guiora, a former senior Israeli counterterrorism official and judge. The results are then added to a comprehensive database of terrorists and are studied for trends.

Israel's methodical research has provided breakthroughs into how to persuade individuals not to become terrorists in the first place, how to create dissension within their ranks and how to marginalize terrorist organizations and delegitimize their leadership, according to Dr. Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist and the CIA's former top psychological profiler.

The United States' continued reliance on coercive techniques shows that it has far to go in understanding what kinds of interrogation methods work, said Richardson, author of the 2006 book, "What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat."

"The U.S. is repeating the same mistakes that other democracies have made," she said. "They overreact initially by relying on force, and over time learn that force is not the most productive response."